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Dell Monday confirmed it has cut its global workforce by what it called a "small percentage," which could mean a reduction of thousands of employees.

Dell won't say exactly how many jobs have been cut.

Dell employed 113,000 workers worldwide at the end of its 2013 fiscal year, which ended Feb 1., 2013, according to its last annual as a public company. About 40,500 of those employees were located in the U.S., according to the annual report, filed nearly year ago.

In an emailed statement, Dell spokesman David Frink said he "can confirm that a small percentage of Dell's global team members accepted the company's offer of a significant severance package associated with a voluntary separation program."

Frink said that the company has "taken steps to optimize our business, streamline operations and improve our efficiency over the past few years. And, like any prudent business, we'll continue to do so. Meanwhile, we're hiring in strategic areas of our business, including hardware and software development, engineering and customer coverage worldwide."

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov, or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed . His email address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.